Our LocationKilgoris, Narok County, Kenya

Africa globally is pegged as the next growth frontier given its youthful population which stood at 60% of its 1.2 billion people as of 2017. This is projected to double over the years by 2050.

Closer home, Kenya’s youth population (age 15-24) in 2017 as per data held by US based Population Reference Bureau stood at 20.3% of its overall population of 49.7 million. This revelation spelled a huge need for the country to position itself in a space where it will be able to adequately tap into this resource for economic growth.

The government over the past two years has moved to address this through enacting a series of shift in policy. The policies have been focused on allocating more resources to the education sector for the promotion of how Science, Technology, English and Mathematics (STEM) is taught in secondary schools.

STEM program for secondary schools was launched and piloted in a few schools in 2016 with its primary objective being the inspiring of more students to not only opt for careers in Science and Mathematics but to also excel in these career paths.

A sure way of doing this which is becoming obvious day by day is the deploying and integrating of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) in the country’s secondary school curriculum in order to improve the quality of education. Global e-Schools and Communities Initiatives (GESCI) together with the African Digital Schools Initiative (ADSI) and the Ministry of Education of Kenya begun the process of implementing this in 20 schools for a start in order to elevate our quality if education back in 2017.

In Narok County, Kiligoris Girls Secondary School is among the 20 schools selected for this transformation into a digital school of distinction. The end goal for this Digital school of Distinction framework is to help the schools through the integration of ICT into the curriculum as a way of improving the quality of teaching of STEM subjects. This is being done as of March 2018 in phases through first building our capacity by providing the much required ICT teacher professional development and infrastructure resources.

As a school we are doubling down on our continued efforts to improve our students’ performance in STEM subjects with this unique ADSI project being implemented by GESCI with the full support of the MasterCard Foundation.